A portable electronic device is in essence a mobile device that can be easily carried to various locations by its user where it is then able to connect with external devices and then perform data transfers with those external devices. For example, when a user of a smart phone arrives into their office and sits next to their office desktop computer, an automatic process may connect the smart phone with the desktop to allow data transfer between the two devices.
There are several wired and wireless communication protocols that can be used to make a connection between two devices. A wired network may be joined via an Ethernet port of the portable device. For a wireless connection, the portable device and the external device may both be interoperable using a wireless local area network (WLAN) protocol, such as the IEEE 802.11 Standard (also referred to as WiFi). This protocol allows peer-to-peer direct connections between the portable device and an external device such as a desktop personal computer (also referred to as a wireless ad-hoc network mode). In addition, the WiFi protocol also supports a connection to a router and/or an access point of a centralized wireless network. The connection between the portable device and the external device may alternatively be made using a Bluetooth protocol which may be used to create a personal area network in which several devices located within relatively short distances to each other are connected. Finally, exchange of data between the portable device and the external device may occur at an even shorter range (e.g., up to 20 cm) using a near field communication (NFC) protocol. NFC uses magnetic field induction, where one loop antenna in the portable device comes sufficiently close to another loop antenna in the external device, effectively forming an air-core transformer in which data is transferred between the two devices.
All of the above-described protocols for device-to-device communications require some type of identification process generically referred to here as network device discovery. This process is performed to set up a connection or a communication channel between the two devices. Certain characteristics of various network device discovery processes are worth noting. For instance, WiFi requires a configuration process that is more complex and lengthy than that required by Bluetooth, although WiFi is more suitable for operating larger scale networks and has a faster connection and greater distance range than Bluetooth. The set up process for Bluetooth is in turn more complicated and lengthy than that needed for NFC. When an NFC interface is available, it could be used to exchange Bluetooth pairing information to pair, for example, a headset and a smart phone, before handing off the data transfer to the Bluetooth protocol. In other words, the process of activating the Bluetooth interface on both sides, including searching, waiting, pairing and authorization between the two devices, may be replaced by a relatively fast setup over NFC followed by an exchange of Bluetooth pairing information over NFC.